New hobby (it's a fishing report)

Friday afternoon I got a chance to wet a line after almost a week and a half off from fishing and it was not a moment to soon because I was a walking time bomb. You see, I normally fish about every other day and after three or four days off I get a little cranky and I've been so busy with work lately I can barely manage once a week, it's been tragic I tell you.

As I get out off the car you can actually smell fish in the breeze, seriously. I wader up and
rig up my 16' dry dropper dropper rig, my preferred leader these days. I put a klinkhammer up top and a hendrickson nymph I come up with on point and a quill frenchie dropper, this is a deadly combo and it will catch fish anywhere you throw it. I hit the water at just about a run and made it to my favorite run rather quickly, ah, at last...

Fishing was a little slower than I would've expected, or maybe I was just rusty from the extended vacation. I normally stick a lot of fish in this run, but not today, so I start making my way slowly up river, working the water like a grid from left to right. The water is a little higher than I'm used to and I suddenly find myself chest deep in a pretty fast current, after a little moon walking I'm back to safer water and continue my grid. As I reach a nice seam that usually produces half a dozen bows in quick order I fire my rig into the slack water, perfect cast, slow meandering drift and then the sudden stop...LIFT! The set felt kinda funny, kinda like a spongy log, my line slowly moved upstream and I say to myself, self, this fella doesn't realize he's hooked. As I lowered my rod and laid the wood to him he come alive and I suddenly realized how big this fish was, I catch a lot of big fish here and the 12 inchers feel six inches bigger than they are but, this thing was different. He stayed tucked tight to the bottom, my 5 wt. straining under the pressure as I try to lift him up for a looksie, I guess that ticked him off and hit the current and hauled it down stream stripping line with me in tow. This would be his undoing and as I swing him into the shallows I get my first glimpse of him...what the...



At first I was disappointed that my fish of a lifetime (I honestly thought this was a 30 inch trout) was a dirt sucker, red horse, carp or whatever the heck he was but, then I thought to myself, self, that was pretty darn fun even if he is ugly as sin. Apparently these things are spawning cuz he milked my net pretty good, yeah that was kinda gross, and I saw a lot more of them in the shallows later that day. I ended up catching a lot of trout later that evening as the quills and caddis started coming off but, all the while I was still thinking about that ugly fish that started off my day...I think I may just have a new hobby...

Sounds like a pretty cool catch...except for the milking part of course .

That thing has some nice fins on it...I'm guessing that sure helped out the fight.

Milliam, do you remember the time we "snuck" up on a pod of those things and crawled over that rock to look at them when they wouldn't hit? Took us about five minutes to figure out it wasn't monster trout. lol

the fun is in the catchin' - whatever it is. unless it's chubs. There's not much fun in chub catching.

Dell wrote: ... I ended up catching a lot of trout later that evening as the quills and caddis started coming off but, all the while I was still thinking about that ugly fish that started off my day...I think I may just have a new hobby...

And so it begins. One day you're a trout fisherman, then you hook a red horse or a carp or, God forbid, a gar, and next thing you know you're buying a new 7 wt. and buying flies called "Carp Stew". Welcome to the dark side.

Well it was bound to happen...ha...I think I wanna be a muskie fisherman when I grow up...